A user often needs to access online contents provided by a number of different content providers in the Internet. Often some of these content providers require user authentication and authorization before granting accesses to its contents. For example, a content provider allows accesses to its privileged contents only to paid subscribers, as such it requires a user to authenticate and identify herself as a paid subscriber.
For a heavy content consumer subscribed to many different content providers, having to establish an account in each content provider and authenticate each time for content access in each content provider is a highly redundant and inconvenient activity. Some existing solutions provide content aggregator portals aggregating online contents from disparate content providers into a single online asset or web site. This way, the content consumer needs only one account and one-time authentication at the content aggregator portal. Other variations of content aggregating solution place the content aggregator at the content consumer's client computing device, for example the browser. However, these content aggregator solutions require tight-coupling integrations with the content providers that are expensive and complicated. Also, user authentication credentials must still be established for each content provider and stored in the content aggregator.
Still some other existing solutions use some forms of a dedicated single-sign-on (SSO) system, in which a primary authentication system is used to store and manage user accounts and provide authentications and authorizations to the users. In these SSO systems, trusted logged-in sessions are maintained for logged-in users and are propagated to the integrated content providers as the logged-in users access them. The integrated content providers rely on the trusted logged-in sessions in permitting user accesses without presenting authentication challenges, thus achieving the single-sign-on functionality. However, these solutions also require tight-coupling integrations with the content providers that are expensive and complicated.